Stock market today: Asian shares mostly gain after Wall St rallies to new records

BANGKOK (AP) — Shares were mostly higher in Asia on Tuesday after U.S. stocks rallied to more records, with gains for technology companies pushing the benchmarks higher.

U.S. futures were flat and oil prices declined.

This week has few top-tier economic reports apart from an update Tuesday on how much American shoppers are spending at U.S. retailers and a preliminary look Friday at the state of U.S. business activity. U.S. markets will be closed Wednesday for the Juneteenth holiday.

Tokyo's Nikkei 225 index gained 0.9% to 38,441.90. Toyota Motor Corp., a market heavyweight, gained 0.6% after its shareholders rejected a proposal to force Akio Toyoda, grandson of the automaker's founder, to leave his post as chairman of the board.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng shed 0.2% to 17,903.06 and the Shanghai Composite index gained 0.4% to 3,026.61.

In South Korea, the Kospi advanced 0.8% to 2,766.22.

In Sydney, the S&P/ASX 200 jumped 1% to 7,776.20 after the Reserve Bank of Australia kept its key interest rate unchanged.

“While the Bank at its May meeting noted that inflation had fallen more gradually than expected, it today described it as ‘persistent,’ emphasizing that headline inflation as well as inflation excluding volatile items and travel had not fallen any further between April and December,” Capital Economics said in a commentary.

Admittedly, the Bank noted that ‘momentum in economic activity is weak,’ with the statement citing slow GDP growth, a rise in the unemployment rate and slower-than-expected wages growth,'' it said.

India's Sensex rose 0.4% to 77,291.77.

On Monday, U.S. stocks rose to records as gains for technology companies keep pushing the market higher.

the S&P 500 rose 0.8%, beating an all-time high it set on Thursday. It closed at 5,473.23. The Dow gained 0.5% to 38,778.10, and the Nasdaq composite jumped 1% to 17,857.02.

Autodesk jumped 6.5% for one of the market’s biggest gains after an investment firm said it will try to delay the software company’s annual meeting so it can nominate new directors for the board.

Close behind Autodesk was chip company Broadcom, which rose 5.4% to add to gains from last week after it reported better profit than expected and said it would undergo a 10-for-one stock split to make its price more affordable. Broadcom followed Nvidia, the company that’s become the poster child of Wall Street’s frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology and just executed a similar split.

Apple gained 2% and Microsoft climbed 1.2%.

Super Micro Computer, which sells server and storage systems used in artificial intelligence and other computing, leaped 5.1% to bring its gain for the year so far to a staggering 212.2%.

The gains for tech helped offset pressure on the stock market caused by rising Treasury yields in the bond market. The climb in yields erased some of the slack created last week when better-than-expected reports on inflation raised hopes that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates later this year.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 4.28% from 4.22% late Friday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, rose to 4.76% from 4.71%.

The Fed is trying to hold rates high for long enough to slow the economy and snuff out high inflation, but it wants to cut rates and reverse the momentum before the slowdown evolves into a painful recession.

High interest rates hurt all kinds of investments, and they tend to hit some areas particularly hard. Utilities in the S&P 500 fell 1.1% for Monday's largest loss among the 11 sectors that make up the index. They often get hurt when bonds are paying more in interest and drawing away income-seeking investors who would otherwise gravitate to dividend-paying utility stocks.

GameStop was another laggard and fell 12.1% following its annual shareholder meeting. The stock has been soaring and sinking as it rides waves of enthusiasm by smaller-pocketed investors. At the meeting, CEO Ryan Cohen said the struggling video game retailer will focus on cutting costs, which would involve a “smaller network of stores.”

In other dealings, U.S. benchmark crude oil lost 17 cents to $80.19 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Brent crude gave up 30 cents top $84.19 per barrel.

The dollar rose to 157.59 Japanese yen from 156.38 yen. The euro was trading at $1.0724 from $1.0702.

AP Business Writer Stan Choe contributed.

A person walks in the rain in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei 225 index at a securities firm Tuesday, June 18, 2024, in Tokyo. Shares were mostly higher in Asia on Tuesday after U.S. stocks rallied to more records, with gains for technology companies pushing the benchmarks higher. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

People walk in the rain in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei 225 index at a securities firm Tuesday, June 18, 2024, in Tokyo. Shares were mostly higher in Asia on Tuesday after U.S. stocks rallied to more records, with gains for technology companies pushing the benchmarks higher. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

A person stands in the rain in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei 225 index at a securities firm Tuesday, June 18, 2024, in Tokyo. Shares were mostly higher in Asia on Tuesday after U.S. stocks rallied to more records, with gains for technology companies pushing the benchmarks higher. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

FILE - Trader William Lovesick, right works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, June 12, 2024. Shares have opened mixed in Europe on Monday, June 17, 2024, as markets recovered from shocks of recent elections across the region. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

FILE - Specialist James Denaro works at his post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on June 12, 2024. Global shares were mixed on Friday, June 14, 2024, after Wall Street touched fresh records, with benchmarks pushed higher by the frenzy over artificial intelligence technology. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Currency traders watch monitors near the screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), left, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, June 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A currency trader passes by the screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), left, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, June 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A currency trader watches monitors near the screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), top left, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won, top center, at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, June 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.

Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared that he had won during the early morning hours after Election Day. That led his allies to demand that officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the U.S.

But one of many reasons we are unlikely to know the winner quickly on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay the count. Another is that most indications are this will be a very close election, and it takes longer to determine who won close elections than blowouts.

In the end, election experts note, the priority in vote-counting is to make sure it's an accurate and secure tally, not to end the suspense moments after polls close.

“There's nothing nefarious about it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The time delay is to protect the integrity of the process.”

Trump's demand also doesn't seem to account for the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.

David Becker, an elections expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” debunking Trump’s 2020 election lies, said it’s not realistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”

During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded that the race be decided soon after some polls begin closing.

“They have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night," Trump said. "Bunch of crooked people. These are crooked people.”

It was not clear who he was targeting with the “crooked people” remark.

Timing is one example of why Trump's demands don't match the reality of conducting elections in the U.S. By 11 p.m. Eastern time, polls will just be closing in the two Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.

Trump has led conservatives to bemoan that the U.S. doesn't count elections as swiftly as France or Argentina, where results for recent races have been announced within hours of polls closing. But that's because those countries tabulate only a single election at a time. The decentralized U.S. system prevents the federal government from controlling elections.

Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each of which has its own races for the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures to tabulate at the same time. That's why it takes longer for the U.S. to count votes.

The Associated Press calls races when there is no possibility that the trailing candidate can make up the gap. Sometimes, if one candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be called quickly. But if the margin is narrow, then every last vote could matter. It takes a while before every vote is counted even in the most efficient jurisdictions in the country.

In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won the U.S. Senate race in Florida, a state conservatives regularly praise for its quick tally. But the AP didn't call Scott's victory until after the conclusion of a recount on Nov. 20 because Scott's margin was so slim.

It also takes time to count every one of the millions of votes because election officials have to process disputed, or “provisional,” ballots, and to see if they were legitimately cast. Overseas ballots from military members or other U.S. citizens abroad can trickle in at the last minute. Mail ballots usually land early, but there's a lengthy process to make sure they're not cast fraudulently. If that process doesn't start before Election Day, it can back up the count.

Some states, such as Arizona, also give voters whose mail ballots were rejected because the signatures didn't match up to five days to prove they actually cast the ballot. That means final numbers simply cannot be available Tuesday night.

Some of the sluggishness is due to state-specific election rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the most important swing states, election officials for years have pleaded with Republican lawmakers to change the law that prevents them from processing their mail ballots before Election Day. That means mail ballots get tallied late, and frequently the results don't start to get reported until after Election Day.

Democrats have traditionally dominated mail voting, which has made it seem like Republicans are in the lead until the early hours of the next morning, when Democratic mail votes finally get added to the tally. Experts even have names for this from past elections — the “red mirage” or the “blue shift.” Trump exploited that dynamic in 2020 when he had his supporters demand an abrupt end to vote counts — the ballots that remained untallied were largely mail ones that were for Joe Biden. It's not clear how that will play out this year, since Republicans have shifted and voted in big numbers during early voting.

Michigan used to have similar restrictions, but after Democrats won control of the state Legislature in 2022 they removed the prohibition on early processing of mail ballots. That state's Democratic Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, said she hopes to have most results available by Wednesday.

“At the end of the day, chief election officials are the folks who have the ability to provide those accurate results. Americans should focus on what they say and not what any specific candidate or folks who are part of the campaign say,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Some of Trump's allies say he should be even more aggressive about declaring victory this time around.

Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who in 2020 predicted the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, advocated for a similar strategy during a recent press conference after he was released from federal prison, where he was serving time for a contempt of Congress conviction related to the investigation into Trump's effort to overturn his loss in 2020.

“President Trump came up at 2:30 in the morning and talked," Bannon said. "He should have done it at 11 o'clock in 2020.”

Other Trump supporters have taken a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing American Truth Project podcast that violence could erupt in states still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people “are just not going to put up with it.”

Trying to project a sense of inevitability about a Trump win, the former president and his supporters have been touting early vote data and favorable polls to contend the election is all but over. Republicans have returned to voting early after largely staying away at Trump's direction in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are outvoting Democrats in early voting.

But that doesn't mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful sense. Early voting data does not tell you who will win an election because it only records who voted, not how they voted.

Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign has been explicitly targeting Republicans disillusioned by Trump. In each of those states where more Republicans have voted, there also are huge numbers of voters casting early ballots who are not registered with either of the two major political parties. If Harris won just a tiny fraction more of those votes than Trump, it would erase the small leads Republicans have.

There's only one way to find out who won the presidential election: Wait until enough votes are tallied, whenever that is.

FILE - An election official sorts mail ballots at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix, March 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Serkan Gurbuz, File)

Washoe County election workers sort ballots at the Registrar of Voters Office in Reno, Nev., Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Tom R. Smedes)

FILE - Allegheny County Election Division Deputy Manager Chet Harhut carries a container of mail-in ballots from a secure area at the elections warehouse in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Trump wants the presidential winner to be declared on election night. That's highly unlikely

Trump wants the presidential winner to be declared on election night. That's highly unlikely

FILE - An election worker examines a ballot at the Clackamas County Elections office, May 19, 2022, in Oregon City, Ore. Problems with a ballot-sorting machine are delaying the vote count in a suburban Portland, Oregon county where issues with blurry bar codes on mail-in ballots delayed elections results in a key Congressional primary race for two weeks in 2022. (AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus, File)